John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Edited by Edward Watts and David J. Carlson

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John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture critically reassesses the significance of American novelist, editor, critic, and activist John Neal to the transatlantic literary culture of the nineteenth century. Long appreciated primarily as a powerful advocate of literary nationalism in the United States, Neal is presented in this volume as an innovative literary stylist, a penetrating cultural critic, a pioneering regionalist, and a vital participant in the business of letters in America over a sixty-year career. The volume’s contributors (including scholars from the United States, Germany, England, Italy, and Israel) employ a wide range of critical methodologies (legal studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, etc.) to survey Neal’s career from his early novel writing in the 1820s to his culminating autobiography, published in 1869. Special attention is paid to his work as an editor, journalist, critic, and publisher in a variety of journals. Throughout this discussion, Neal emerges as a vastly underappreciated artist and a figure of considerable importance to the ongoing reassessment of the American Renaissance and the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. The editors’ introduction (and the volume as a whole) offers an overview of the present vitality of the new Neal scholarship while also suggesting a number of areas for future research and inquiry. « lessmore »

Edward Watts is professor of English at Michigan State University. David J. Carlson is professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.

Introduction: John Neal: Across the American Renaissance, Edward Watts and David J. Carlson Chapter One: “’I Must Resemble Nobody’: John Neal, Genre, and the Making of American Literary Nationalism,” Matthew PethersChapter Two: “The Herbage of Death”: Haunted Environments in John Neal and James Fenimore Cooper,” Matthew Wynn SivilsChapter Three: “Eye-Witness to History: The Anti-Narrative Aesthetic of Neal’s Seventy-Six,” Jeffrey InskoChapter Four: “Notes on Poetic Push-Pin and the Writing of Life in John Neal's Authorship,“ Jorg Thomas Richter Chapter Five: “Celebrated Rubbish: John Neal and the Commercialization of Early American Romanticism,” Maya MerlobChapter Six: “John Neal, The Rise of the Critick, and the Rise of American Art,” Francesca Orestano Chapter Seven: “John Neal and John Dunn Hunter,” Jonathan Elmer Chapter Eight: “Another Declaration of Independence”: John Neal’s Rachel Dyer and the Assault on Precedent,” David J. CarlsonChapter Nine: “Here, There, and Everywhere: The Elusive Regionalism of John Neal,”Kerin Holt” Chapter Ten: “’He Could Not Believe that Butchering Red Men Was Serving Our Maker’: ‘David Whicher’ and the Indian Hater Tradition,” Edward WattsChapter Eleven: “John Neal and the Early Discourse of Women’s Rights,” Karen Weyler Chapter Twelve: “A Right Manly Man” in 1843: John Neal on Women’s Rights and the Problem of Male Feminism,” Fritz Fleischmann Chapter Thirteen: “How John Neal Wrote His Autobiography,” Kevin J. Hayes Works Cited List of ContributorsIndex